Thursday, November 26, 2015

New Chinese Plant Will Clone 1 Million Cows Annually

Imagine one million identical cows marching shoulder to shoulder and
rib to rib down a path to the slaughterhouse. Imagine one million
identical cows getting the same idea simultaneously to turn around and
storm the cloning plant that created them. Somewhere in between is what
probably will happen when the world’s largest cloning plant, currently
under construction in China, goes into full operation in early 2016.

Plant where 1 million cows will be cloned annually

The $31 million plant is being built in Tianjin (160 km (100 miles)
from Beijing) by BoyaLife, a three-year-old biotech firm specializing in
stem cell and regenerative medicine, biological products, drug
innovation and hereditary diseases research. The plan for the 14,000
square meter (150,000 sq. ft.) plant is to produce 100,000 cloned cattle
embryos the first year and ramp quickly up to a million annually to
satisfy China’s rapidly-growing demand for beef.In addition to cattle, the company will clone pet dogs, police dogs,
racehorses and “non-human primates,” with the somewhat altruistic goal
of being the first to someday clone endangered pandas.

Cloned pigs

What could possibly go wrong? Here’s what Xu Xiaochun, CEO of BoyaLife, has to say:

We are going [down] a path that no one has ever traveled. We are building something that has not existed in the past.

That’s not promising. Neither is the fact that BoyaLife is partnered
with Sooam Biotech, a South Korean company run by Hwang Woo-suk – the
former “king of cloning” who was found guilty in 2006 of research fraud and gross ethical lapses in his attempts to derived stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos.What else? The plant is near the site of chemical explosions that killed at least 165 people in August. China has recently had many major food safety scandals.
Many are concerned the cloned beef will be rushed to market without
thorough testing and some suggest that the testing be done on corporate
and national leaders – not a bad idea.While China’s experts say cloned beef is safe to eat, the European
parliament in September proposed a ban on cloned animals for food and a
halt to importing products derived from them. In the U.S., the Food and
Drug Administration approved
the sale of cloned beef for food in 2008 but doesn’t require the
products to be labeled as such and many believe it is being sold
anonymously.Is the world or China ready for massive amounts of cloned beef from
BoyaLife? How will we know if it’s safe? Would you eat cloned beef? Do
you think you’re already eating it?What could possibly go wrong?